Video Transcript
This video’s full transcript has been provided below for your convenience.
Ta-dah. Hey, guys. Ladies and gentlemen, today is Thursday. I guess I’m a day late. I wanted to…What are we going to do today? We’re going to talk about profiles, just global profiles. Excuse me. And I want you to think of a profile just like a memory, a way to save a snapshot of how your radio is generally set up. Think of it as the push buttons on your old AM radio in your car. That’s sort of what a global profile is.
Oh, geez. Where’s the share screen? I guess it’s right here. There we go. Let’s go to this. If you have a look at the manual, the SmartSDR software user’s guide, which is available in the download area, which is very useful, Section 18.3 talks about global profiles. And global profiles are something that you have to save. And I use them for a lot of different reasons. I’ve got satellite profiles because on this particular radio, I do a number of items with VHF and UHF or six and two meters and… Hey, Mike, how are you? That’s what a global profile is about. If you look at it, it tried to highlight some stuff and they manage the state of our pan adapters and slice receivers and the layout and put it on frequency. That’s really what a global profile does. So you may want to take a minute and read through this. I’m not going to read it for you. I figured most of you can read. I’m kidding. I know all of you can read. Have a look at this.
And changes to global profiles are not saved automatically. You have to save them. So I’m going to show you how to do that and how to make a couple. Have a look at this Section 18.3. There’s how you save them, we’ll show that, and how you load them, and we’ll talk a little bit about that. And there’s some default profiles. And this is a whole section you may want to take a few minutes to go all the way through. I could spend a lot of time on it, but it’s reasonably well-worded.
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Let’s look at a global profile. Just bear with me a second while I stop this and I then have to stop that, and I got to share an application. Let’s call it SmartSDR, and there we go.
Hey, Richard. How are you? Well, hopefully, Richard, you’ll know a little bit about more profiles. I don’t use them a lot. I’ve been playing with them a little bit. Maybe that’s just me. As I change bands and stuff, I always check to make sure everything’s set up.
This is a live screen, and you could do this on a Maestro or an M model, but we’re going to use SmartSDR. And it happens to be on a frequency where I just generally load some warnings just to see if I can hear some UHF and VHF beacons.
I think right here is the two-meter beacon, and, yesterday, it was booming in. It’s about 150 kilometers away and, today, I got nothing. So that’s okay.
“That’s what global profiles do; they allow you to just save memories.”
But that’s not what we’re here for. If you look all the way down under profiles, you get to see all these. And here’s a satellite profile for cast four. Don’t worry about that it’s a satellite profile, but it’s a configuration I’ve saved. And if I just click on it, it’ll reconfigure my screen. And I’ve just kind double click on these arrows to bring the VFO slices into view. Look at those birdies. So that’s what a profile does; it has set this up for me so that I’ve got two meters on transverter A and UHF on transverter B.
But I have another profile and we can… what I did is a 20 meter FT81. And boom, there it is. And that’s how I saved it.
So how do you save a profile? Well, let’s say you had a, and I don’t have a really good HF antenna on this radio, but let’s just say, you were going to go to band 40 meters. Forty meters. We’re going to mute that call that’s ringing. Phone’s ringing off the hook today.
[5:00]
I’m going to zoom in a little bit and maybe it’s on that frequency. I’ve got the right I’m in the lower side band. And I could just save profile. Save global profile. And good; you can see that. I can call that “40 meter…” whatever “… test”. Or whatever you want to call it. And I’m just going to hit save. So I’ve now saved that profile.
Let’s just pick up another one that I’ve got. Oh, FT8 on two meters. So I’m just going to double click on that. And I must have obviously saved this with two pan adapters, but you get the idea.
So now let’s go back to the one that I just had profiles and you can see it here. So we did that 20 meter FF8. What was the 40 meter one? Are these in alphabetical order? We just did… 40 meter tests. There it is. Double click. And we’re now back to the one we saved.
And so that’s what global profiles do; they allow you to just save memories. So one of the cool ways to do this, you could say have an 80 meter net call, rather than doing it as a memory location, which I do, but I have HF net I listen to, so I can go into my memories and I can pull out all my 60 meter frequencies are here or a whole bunch of different things…. Like you can do memories. So let’s go to… Oh, here’s HF net I listen to quite a bit. So that just puts that there. So that’s a memory.
But if I’d gone to 80 and that was on CW or something, it would be in the wrong mode. Or actually that’s not true. It would just go to the frequency. And if I had a second pan adapter, it wouldn’t change it. With a profile, it saves the entire screen layout and you have to remember to save it. So that’s what global profiles are about as well. Now we could go into transmit profiles and mic profiles, but we’ll do that at a later time. I just wanted to discuss global profiles and that you have to save them and you have to remember to use them.
Now, one of the things about profiles is make sure you save them. So there’s an import/export thing here. So I went profiles, import/export profiles. And exporting is how you save them and I can save everything and I’m going to export. And it’s going to ask me where I want to put them. So I’ve got 6600M profiles, and you can put them in a new folder if you want to keep different copies of your profiles. And I can just say, okay, and it’s going to do that. It says here, “Exporting”.
And the cool thing about that is if you ever had to send your radio for support, this is something you want to do. And you do need to do it from a PC. You can’t do it on a M model. You have to have a PC. So this is one of the few times you actually have to run SmartSDR on a PC to save your profiles. And if we send the radio in, they’re going to upgrade the software to the latest software for version two, or version three as part of a support process. And they’ll let you know that, but they probably should ask you, and I think they do, to make sure you save your profiles so that when you get your radio back, you can just reimport by going into the same profiles. You can go into the profile manager and you can load… Actually, that’s not true. We’re going to profiles and we’re going to import/export profiles, but we want to import the ones we saved. So you just point to the directory that you had them in. And here’s a bunch I’ve saved. They’re done at different times. And so you can actually stack them up too and have a whole bunch. So that is global profiles.
Richard and I will probably go into transmit profiles a bit later, but have a look in the manual on transmit profiles. Let’s go back to this. I’ll stop sharing. Let’s see, I got to remove you. You get me back. I’ve got to stop and then share the manual which is here.
And so transmit profiles are in here. They describe what is saved in a transmit profile and what is saved in a mic profile. So these are mic profile fields. This is what’s saved in a mic profile. And these are what saved in a transmit profile. And if I remember correctly, global profiles load the associated transmit profile. But it does say that somewhere. Doo, doo, doo. I don’t want to go back up too far and confuse everybody.
[10:00]
“Global profiles also record the linking of the transmit antenna and each slice to a transmit profile.” So the cool thing is, test it. Hey, Santiago, how are you? Try it. See how it works for you. But I’ve really liked using global profiles because I can save them. I’ve got satellite ones, I’ve got digital ones, I’ve got different ones for different bands. This is not my main radio. So this is just a test radio. And I use them to monitor beacons and all sorts of things. So, cool thing is, try it. You can’t break it. And you can always delete profiles. FRStack, by the way, is a cool program that if you have to delete a bunch of profiles or change them, if you’re not familiar with FRStack, it’s a great add on for that sort of thing. So that’s all about global profiles in just a pinch.
So you guys have a good day. I hope you… some of you guys work some media scatter stuff. I worked a ton today and this morning. I was up really early and some really good scatter. So I caught a few new grids and so WSJT, Slice Master, and away you go. And I was looking… No. No two meter stuff at the moment. 73 guys. Take care. Thanks for listening. Have a good day. Mike va3mw.